Blizzards World Championship Revealed

The rumors began about a week ago, with small doses of news coming from Korean websites and community figures twitting “4/03/13.” Most of the Starcraft 2 community, have been waiting for this moment to see what giant step Blizzard would take into the esports world. We saw Valve support Dota 2 with not just more competitive features; Joining live games to spectate, tutoring system and the clan support. They also threw in the 1.4 million dollars tournament called, The International. The following year Riot, developer of League of Legends came out with there year long season for 1.6 million dollars, which is the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS).

Starcraft 2 community was left wondering if Blizzard would announce anything similar. Which they did, in the same year they revealed the World Championship Series (WCS). It was Blizzard dipping their feet into esports, was it everything we wanted? No, but it was the step in the right direction. The way WCS worked was; NASL,MLG, Dreamhack, ESL, and GSL would hold the regional tournaments during their events. Which lead to a lot of spectators not caring about the WCS, until the continental finals. Here we saw Dreamhack hold the European WCS separate from it’s normal event; the games were amazing, the crowd was huge, and the production value was one of the best. With what Dreamhack did, many thought Blizzard would choose them to run the Grand Finals in China, but that was not the case. In comparison to the International and LCS, it was a flop; technical issues, delays, and the feeling of it being rushed.

At the end of the tournament Mike Morhaime cofounder of Blizzard, vowed that WCS will be ran better in 2013. With this announcement they made today it certainly is looking like it.

Since Gamespot was given the exclusive details, head on over to Gamespot. Here is a small snippet of the announcement.

” Blizzard announced that it will use both GomTV and OnGameNet in South Korea, Major League Gaming in North America, and Turtle Entertainment’s Electronic Sports League in Europe. Each will operate their region’s WCS league for the year. There will be three separate seasons in 2013 each with regional finals and a season finals event. A unified global player ranking system will be established with points given to players at each event, culminating with the top 16 players in points vying for a spot to be called World Champion at the BlizzCon Global Finals. Next year there will be four seasons.” -Rod Breslau